Swell Pedal Potentiometer

OrganQuest is alive!   Been a bit quiet for what, a few years?  What happened?  Well life happened and continues to happen, but that's no excuse so here we are again.

The two analog organs are still in the garage.  Well one is.  The other is now mostly MIDI-fied. As I think I wrote earlier, I ran into a few tricky spots, the last of which was my attempt to install the oh so important swell controlling variable resistor.  

Most electronic organs use a rotary resistor, but the range of motion is not really compatible with most commercially available rotary resistors.  And if you choose to use a linear resistor as I did, things get even more interesting.

I tend to obsess about details, so it was easy to get bogged down in prototype building.  The ideal solution will probably eventually turn out to be use of a 3D printer to create the desired support for the linear 10k potentiometer, but that means money and/or time.  In the meantime, there are some more straightforward solutions. Here's one way to do it:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/52179600@N06/8895491765/in/album-72157633819682339/

or even simpler:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/7973276@N04/15263468498/in/album-72157648420143055/

You will note that some of these contraptions tend to require a bit of 'elbow room', which I am trying to minimize.  I also am trying to recycle the original Rodgers Swell pedal mechanisms, so obviously things got complicated fast.  Stay tuned for progress and feel free to post your suggestions.

Movie Magic

In my next blogpost I plan to get back to writing about midification of an electronic organ, but first I just have to share a holiday movie with you.

By way of background, yes, it's that time of year in the U.S., the Thanksgiving-Hanukkah-Kwanzaa-Christmas season. For those of you outside the U.S., all you need to know is that Thanksgiving still has some solid remnants of good, honest, family togetherness left to it. The Christmas holidays have been hijacked by corporations (and some churches) wringing the last drop of humanity out of any well-meaning soul that falls into their marketing territory. But Thanksgiving is arguably still mainly about being with family and gratefully sharing a nice meal together. I was fortunate to be able to simply visit with my family rather than worry about shopping and gifts and all the scheduling anxieties that come with the X-mas season. But the day after Thanksgiving is called Black Friday for reasons best left to the imagination, and that day is probably better spent at home if you dislike competing with crowds of greedy consumers as much as I do.

So instead, we watched a jewel of a movie called "A Christmas Without Snow", and although it is set in San Francisco, a city not far from where I write this, it was the first time I watched this film. The main story is about a demanding choirmaster preparing a small amateur choir to sing Handel's Messiah but there are multiple personal stories interwoven around this unifying theme. Whoever wrote the script knew a thing or two about the craft of making music, because the dialogue is spot on. It's one of those classic movies with lines that any music lover can and will appreciate. The writer also knew something about organs, there are a few priceless scenes comparing a pipe organ with an electronic imitation to quite humorous effect.

There's a free download (public domain) at:

https://archive.org/details/AChristmasWithoutSnow

I found both DivX and Mp4 versions playable. If you don't have a player, VLC player will play almost anything:

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html

but you can probably use whatever player you have, perhaps even Windows Media Player!

If you like music and films that appeal to both mind and heart, I hope you have a chance to watch this movie before the holidays are over.